my first CAS-ual Friday card

After following along for the past couple of weeks, this is my first entry into the CAS-ual Fridays blog where the challenge this week (CFC70) was black, white, and one other color of your choice.  I dearly love this cutout butterfly on the CTMH Art Philosophy and decided to go with orange in honor of the monarch butterflies; I have never seen their migration but if I were to actually make a bucket list, I believe I would have to put that on it.

I tried several plain orange papers but none of them was quite what I was looking for so I used the CTMH Backgrounds and Borders stamp set (D1463) using Sunset cardstock and ink to make my own patterned paper and was pleased with the little extra dimension that created.  Then I used the "Soar" stamp from the Live Out Loud set which was the July stamp of the month set to try a watercolor/crackle embossing technique I saw on one of Jeanette Lynton's blog posts.  I first stamped the image with Sunset ink, let it dry completely, then sponged Versamark randomly onto the same stamp, stamped that directly onto the original image, applied black embossing powder and heat set it.  Not bad for my first attempt but you can check out Jeanette's tutorial for a better example of this technique: Week of Wonder: Two-color, too beautiful